Hackathon Announcement: MTA App Quest 2013 with AT&T

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority of New York and AT&T are joined up for this years MTA Apps Quest. It’s driven by NYU Poly and ChallengePost. The goal of this hackathon will involve solving issues for and improving the experience for MTA’s 8 billion plus transit users. What are the perks for this challenge other than enhancing the transit experience? $50k in prizes will be awarded, which in detail is $10,000 for participants of the hackathon and an additional $40,000 will be awarded after the completion of the virtual challenge. The dates are Saturday May 4th 2013-Sunday May 5th.

Developers will be using MTA’s own public data and APIs to develop apps for smartphones that will do the following:

Provide transit visualizations of timetables, service alerts, and real-time feeds

Augment in-station way-finding, particularly for people with disabilities